44 | HIGHER NEWS | EPSRC GUIDELINES
AND HOW CAN YOU MEET THEM?
GUIDELINES: WHAT ARE THEY
EPSRC
Interview conducted by Frank Steiner, Marketing Manager at University of London Computer Centre (ULCC).
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) guidelines which are coming into effect in May 2015, I decided to catch up with Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre, my colleagues Rory McNicholl and Timothy Miles-Board, and Mathew Addis, CTO at Arkivum to get a beter understanding of what the requirements are and how institutions can meet them.
A
Q When looking into the EPSRC guidelines on research funding, I couldn’t help but notice them being not as tightly defined as I would have thought. Is that deliberate?
KA: I think it is, and there are perfectly valid reasons for it, but some are uncomfortable with that. The flexibility allows for different responses from larger and smaller institutions – you just need to be able to defend what you do.
MA: This is largely due to the variety of research projects and their differing objectives, both in terms of brief
fter receiving an increasing number of enquiries about the new Engineering and Physical
and data output. Some might have a mandate to be publicly accessible first, others will focus on the safety and security of the research data before being concerned about dissemination of research findings.
Q There is a requirement to include an ‘access statement’ in published research papers and for underlying data to be available for scrutiny by others. How can that be achieved?
KA: Puting the data somewhere that has permanence is key, inside or outside the institution. Fundamentally it isn’t difficult. Many researchers aren’t used to doing this yet, but there is a lot of evidence that whenever papers include links to the data behind them the research gets more widely cited. This is something that benefits the researchers, the research funders and the universities so there are incentives all round.
“Many scientific disciplines already have well established standards and it wouldn’t be feasible to impose a one-size-fits-all.” Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
MA: DOIs are a great way to reference data so it’s more easily accessible; for example, a DOI might resolve to a link to an EPrints page which in turn links to the underlying data in storage. But it’s important that these links are persistent and don’t break causing ‘404 errors’.
RM: The DataCite plugin we developed, ensures that Digital Object Identifiers
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